Some of them had more life left in them than others. Missing arms or legs or blinking through the blood that streamed into their eyes yet still fighting to crawl over the bodies beneath them. Their movements made Jane think of the bugs she’d watched her older sisters burn with a magnifying glass. Not to kill—not right away—but to scorch with disfiguring heat. Ants, wasps, beetles, spiders. They all died differently. That’s what made her sisters laugh. Jane never used the magnifying glass herself. Yet she couldn’t pull herself away from watching each of the insects curl or leap or drag themselves over the ground, a pointless struggle to find a hiding place she saw as akin to her own.
One of the soldiers found her leg.
She looked down. Saw nothing there. But in the mirror’s glass he had pulled himself out of the vines of bodies to claw at her. He was one of the ones wearing a uniform she didn’t recognize, a navy sack coat with yellow buttons undone as far as his heart. He was young, pimpled, weasel-snouted—an ugly boy made uglier in his terror. His hands wrapped around her thigh and attempted to pull himself up but the blood was too plentiful to find a dry holding. Each time he would slide down, his cheek resting on the side of her knee. On the third try he went down and stayed there, his eyes fixed on hers.
Someone was screaming.
She assumed it was herself. Then she heard it as a man, though none of the ones lying on the floor of the East Room. It was coming from the floor above. The voice familiar but its shrieking distortion new to her ears.
Her husband.
There was a pause for the intake of breath, then screaming again. Over and over until his voice broke and Jane was alone once more in the silent tide of the dead.
23
Franklin fought to stay awake. He wanted to see what Abby meant in the orangery.
Perhaps I’ll see you tonight?
He lay there, waiting, his thoughts alternating between guilt and his rebuttals to it. He’d been abandoned by his wife. He was on the verge of collapse. He had never felt more alone in his life. The most persuasive excuse was the one he least wanted to dwell on: there were no rules in this house. Behind the whitewashed columns there lived a corruption, something secret and alive and ready to compensate his public propriety with private debasements.
He tried to push back against his shame by remembering Jane. It often helped to go back to the same night in his mind. Dancing together at the barn-smelling church annex in Peterborough. The vivid conjuring of her: the combination of voice and body that charmed him then, but that now offered him the sense of direction he had lost.
At some point he must have slipped into sleep because when he rose back into consciousness he wasn’t alone in his bed.
Next to him was a warm body. It slid up against him, the fingers unbuttoning his nightshirt, laying the two halves aside, stroking a hand down from his throat to his stomach.
“Abigail,” he said, and heard it as unnecessary. It was her. His gratitude and excitement made clear by his body. He resolved not to speak again.
Twice he attempted to rise up on his elbows to touch her as she was touching him, and twice she pressed him back down. She had intentions for him. It felt—what would the word be?—ungentlemanly to be so passive as this. Yet once her movements revealed a clear plan he was happy to submit to it and let her show him what she wished him to.
Abby was smaller than he was expecting, smaller even than Jane. And swifter too, her hands and fingers scrambling over him in a way that felt beyond the capacities of one person. He momentarily wondered at the source of her expertise. Did it matter? No. He couldn’t think of a single thing that did.
He felt a heat between his legs and lay fixed by astonishment. His hardness had been taken in her mouth. It was indescribably lovely. In place of words, it brought a cascade of sensory memories: the mist from a waterfall in the woods behind the Bowdoin campus, a March snow he let fall on his upturned face, the first spoon of soup for supper after missing lunch on a long hike. What was happening had never happened to him before.
Her mouth held him and stroked him for some time before he noticed the music.
A jaunty march he didn’t recognize being played on the piano. It sounded like it was coming from a keyboard rolled up to the grass outside his window. He wasn’t really listening. As if to gain his attention, the melody soured, morphing into discordant plinks and chords of distant thunder. It sounded to Franklin like the music of nausea.
He fought to ignore it. It wasn’t difficult, given the wondrous distraction Abby was providing. Even the fleeting consideration that it was Jane’s playing failed to pull him out of the moment. Soon the music ended entirely—abruptly, with a thud he felt come up through the floorboards—and his mind returned to the sensations of waterfall mist and hunger.
Tap, tap, tap.
The knocks at the door lacked the urgency that Webster or a messenger would bring to it if there was an emergency. He lay there hoping he hadn’t heard it at all.
Tap.
A delicate knuckle against the wood.
Abby had retreated under the bedsheet, leaving him slippery and cold. He almost asked her who she thought could be outside, but worried even their whispers would be detectable from the hallway.
That’s when he calculated the time between the end of the piano playing from downstairs and the knocking. Enough, he thought, for someone to make their way from the Crimson Parlor to his room.
He swept the covers off and pulled his trousers on. With the blankets piled on one side of the bed he didn’t think it would be immediately obvious that someone lay hidden beneath them. His concern was that Abby wouldn’t be able to breathe under their weight for too long.
It took him three strides to reach the door. Each step bringing with it a conclusion built upon the one that came before.
It was Jane.
She had come to ensure he was alone.
He couldn’t let her inside.
At the door he wondered if the thing that had been done to him in his bed could be smelled, or read on his face. Too late either way. Because he was pulling it open and she was there.
“Forgive me. I know it’s late, but— Franklin? Are you all right?”
Abigail stood there.
“I don’t—”
“I was on my way out when I heard the music,” she said. “It was Jane playing. Did you hear it?”
“Yes.”
“I went to see if I could provide her company and saw her go into the East Room. She’s down there alone. I’m worried that—”
“I will see to it.”
“It’s just as I said earlier. There’s something—”
“I will see to it, Abby. Good evening.”
He closed the door before she had turned away. He pivoted on his heel, looking back across the three-step distance between himself and the bed.
The blankets shifted. They had been moving as he stood there, and now, with his eyes on the bed, they continued to rise and roll for the length of a hiccup before they went still.
He took a step. Another, and another. Each unveiling a new horror in his thoughts.
It is Jane lost to madness.
It is something dead.
It is the thing—not alive, but from a place deeper than the grave—they’d felt in the house.
He was about to leave, to start the long negotiation with his rational mind that he hadn’t seen or felt anything over the past minutes that bad dreaming couldn’t explain, when a spot in the blankets bulged upward.